By: dreev
Spec level:
Last updated: 2020-07-14
Gissue: #253
Notice how ugly it is that it’s saying “1 groovies” instead of “1 groovy” and how it’s entirely unclear to the user which they should use. Really there’s no choice but to have a singular and plural version.
Claim: There exists a nice UI where we guess the variants (in this case “grv”, “groovy”, “groovies”, etc) and show examples of how they’ll be used (in the baremin/hardcap header where it needs to be a 1-3 letter abbreviation, in email subjects where it can be a word, on the y-axis where it can be a whole phrase) and you can change them if you want without bogging you down if you don’t want.
(Bee and Dreev had another discussion about this in late 2017 where Bee was finally convinced that this can work, where we make guesses for all 6 variants — {short, medium, long} crossed with {singular, plural} — and let the user customize what they like and mostly get educated about the concept of goal units and start piecing it together in their brain that the y-axis is measuring the thing that Beeminder will be bugging you about doing +3 of by 6 days from now or whatever.)
We put the 6 fields in Settings and have short-singular and short-plural default to “G.U.”. Medium and long can default to current gunits, identical for both singular and plural. Then we start using the short version in places where we need the super concise abbreviation (including the forthcoming Beebrain safesum field that Beedroid/BeemiOS can start using). We can make the abbreviation always be a hyperlink to the settings so when users are like “WTF is G.U.?” they can have learningness. Contrast with status quo where things like “+1 by 12am” induce a big nebulous WTF about Beeminder in general. I know it seems weird that a user can create a goal to get more steps or whatever and then not understand that “+7 by midnight” means 7 more steps, but empirically that is just not obvious to people at first, which is why this is a big deal for onboarding.
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